AT ONE WITH THE INVISIBLE THE MYSTICISM OF THE HEBREW FRANK CHAMBERLIN PORTER The Old Testament Prophets have been understood by Christian people generally as foretellers of Jesus Christ and of various details of his earthly life, death and resurrection. This use and understanding of them has caused neglect of their message for their own age and people, of their close relation to the events and conditions of their time, and of their real significance as discovering, or one may say, creative, minds in the history of the religious progress and achievement of mankind. It has also prevented the effort to understand the inner experiences of the prophets; since if the prophets really wrote of a person or of events centuries in the future, it could only be assumed that they themselves did not know the real meaning of their writing, but were. passive human instruments through whom God spoke and wrote. This way of regarding them may, no doubt, at first seem to exalt and honor them, forbidding their classification with other men. The idea that we can understand the human nature of their experience is excluded by the theory; still more absolutely forbidden is all thought of our learning from their example the real nature of religion, and following them in their inner life with God. In this sense we are not and cannot be prophets. This conception of prophecy was, in fact, a Christian inheritance from Jewish and more especially from Hellenistic Jewish interpretations. I The theory of the passiveness of the prophets as the voice or the pen of the Spirit of God was, in fact, more Greek than Hebrew. Two movements of thought in modern times have changed all this and made such an understanding of the prophets unnatural to us: first, the historical method and spirit of research; and then, more recently, the psychological analysis of religious experience. Historical science has changed the prophets from what Coleridge called "Super-human Ventriloquists" to most living personalities, who have a greatness of their own, and each his own quality of greatness, and who stand almost highest among the path-makers in the history of the religious and ethical advance of man. It has had this effect by concentrating our attention first upon the work of the prophets in and for their own times; and yet their abiding significance and the permanent factors in their teaching have come into clearer light by this emphasis on their relation to these long past situations and events. The comparative study of religions, the last path of historical study to be opened up, tends still further to lessen the isolation and peculiarity of the religion of Israel. It is true that the prophets remain the fact most without parallel in other religions. But comparative studies have tended toward denying uniqueness where it seemed greatest, in ecstasy and vision and in prediction, and bringing uniqueness to light in what seems to us natural, the ethical interpretation of the character and demands of God. It is also true that the significance of the prophets as those who really opened the path toward Christ and Christianity is increased, not lessened, by an historical interpretation which gives them a real place and a great part in the developing life of the human spirit. We now see that the prophets actually achieved, all together, yet each in lines of his own, the truths about God and the experiences of the life of man with God and toward man which were brought to their unity and culmination in the teachings and life of Christ. Historical studies have thus re-discovered the prophets, released them from the obscurity and isolation in which the old theory necessarily held them, and revealed them as great struggling and achieving human beings. But now comes a new method of scientific study that claims its rights in the sphere of religion, past as well as present; and it is not at first so evident that this also will prove a gain, rather than a loss, to religious faith and life. Psychology undertakes to explain the nature of the religious experiences of great as well as average people; and there are many who fear that its tendency is toward reducing the great to the level of the lowly, if not reducing religious experience in general to inward processes which do not require the assumption of the reality of another world than the natural, or another person than the human. Our present study of the mysticism of the prophets must take its start from the findings of history, but must then attempt to understand the nature of their inner life and their special experience of God in the spirit of this newer science. Prophecy in Israel is of three kinds, or presents three distinct aspects, which are also three successive stages of development, though there is over-lapping and some movement back and forth between them. Prophets first meet us as bands of dancing dervishes, inducing ecstatic conditions by music and dancing, and creating a contagious atmosphere of excitement, which draws such outsiders as Saul under its spell (I Sam. 10:5-13, 19:2024). Their emotions very likely found expression in unintelligible outcries of the sort that Paul describes in I Corinthians 12 and 14 as "speaking with tongues." We get the impression that the ecstatic condition itself was the thing cultivated and valued. The revelation was the fact that men could thus become possessed by a divine spirit. Their |